9/24/2015 M/C Reviews ­ Review of Yarn Spinners: A Story in Letters

Review of Yarn Spinners: A Story in Letters Date: Tuesday, August 27 @ 10:58:16 AEST Topic: 'words'

Reviewed by Simone Murray

The genre of literary biography almost by definition misrepresents the warp and weft of writerly experience. By isolating an individual writer’s life in the analytical spotlight, literary biography tends to relegate to the background the complex networks of associations, friendships, rivalries and cultural institutions which make up the lived writerly experience and which are crucial in constructing literary reputations. One challenge to this dominant mode of literary biography has been to bring forward from the shadows helpmeet figures who facilitated in some way the work of a given literary legend, such as Hilary Spurling’s recent biography of Sonia Orwell. A far more radical challenge to the methodology of standard literary biography, however, is to place centre­stage the web of complex interpersonal relationships between writers and the cultural institutions of their time—an almost ecological emphasis on the system, as opposed to the individual agent, as worthy of analytical attention.

Marilla North’s excellent volume Yarn Spinners is the latest addition to a growing genre emphasising networks of collaboration, exchange, support and occasional competitiveness between Australian women writers in the first half of the twentieth century. In this it complements the innovations in feminist biographical method employed in Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy (1990), Sylvia Martin’s Passionate Friends (2001) and Carole Ferrier’s As Good as a Yarn with You (1992), to which North’s title offers an allusive and admiring salute.

North has collated and interwoven a wealth of letters, telegrams, diary entries, professional correspondence, government reports, photographs and memoranda relating to writers Miles Franklin, Dymphna Cusack and Florence James spanning the years 1928 to 1955. Filling the gaps in the narrative with editorial interludes, North has aimed to create an experience which ‘resembles the reading of a novel’. The effect is somewhat reminiscent of a Robert Altman film, with multiple interweaving characters and subplots providing a chronological narrative of the period, and occasionally fracturing into multiple, conflicting perspectives on single events. North’s eye for literary innovation dovetails with those of her subjects. Miles Franklin and Dymphna Cusack collaborated in 1938 on a satire of the social pretensions surrounding Australia’s sesquicentennial celebrations entitled Pioneers on Parade (1939), and Dymphna Cusack and Florence James later co­authored perhaps Australian literature’s most famous collaboration, Come In Spinner (1951). The bestselling Come In Spinner evokes the atmosphere of Sydney during WWII through multistrand plots and a broad cast of characters whose actions are intricately counterpointed during the course of a single week. It is in some sense Yarn Spinners in microcosm: both posit the ‘truth’ of an historical period as inhering not in any single point of view, but in the very experience of contesting where the truth lies. Social history, as John Lennon might have said, is what happens when we’re making other plans.

The personal narrative threading through Yarn Spinners is the intermeshing of the lives and creativity of the three central women, who cherish the creative support provided by each other against a cultural background both profoundly colonial as well as androcentric. As Dymphna Cusack writes to Miles Franklin on the creative and personal importance of their sustaining friendship: ‘our minds struck sparks off each other so superbly’. Simultaneously, the work is a fascinating insight into the politics and cross­currents of literary collaboration: filled with female camaraderie, authorial chivvying, exhortations to hurry up with rewrites or amendments, debates over publishing strategies, writers’ tax returns and contractual legalities. Coexisting with this female writerly bonding is an intriguing subterranean seam of authorial rivalry: Franklin, almost simultaneous with her effusively affectionate letters to Cusack, early on confides in her diary to frustration at Cusack’s slap­happy literary ways. Cusack, for her part, much later writes to James of her hurt and confusion at Franklin’s mania for secrecy, and maintains an eloquent silence on Franklin’s surprisingly tepid Meanjin review of Come In Spinner—the book Cusack and James had dedicated to her.

http://reviews.media­culture.org.au/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=463 1/2 9/24/2015 M/C Reviews ­ Review of Yarn Spinners: A Story in Letters At the broader level of cultural history, the book charts the complex ecology of Sydney literary society and Australian cultural life before and during the Cold War, a period which has tended to be simplistically characterised as a time of imperial quiescence—the Menzies­ ite doldrums between the bush nationalism of the 1890s and the cultural revivalism of the Whitlam years. North challenges such broad­brush pre­conceptions by anatomising the deeply­died—though always contested—politicisation of Australian cultural life during the post­war era. Tellingly, even the anti­Communist and anti­Catholic Franklin is blackballed for a seat on the Commonwealth Literary Fund on the grounds of her leftist sympathies. The book is also rich with insights into the fraught attempt to construct a nationalist literature in the face of cultural institutions fundamentally imbricated in the politics of empire: a publishing industry run as a branch office of London; a critical discourse swinging between the twin poles of cultural cringe and provincial boosterism; and university English departments preoccupied with ‘scrabblings after…Elizabethan miniscules while Aust. Lit. languishes half begun’ [sic]. Against this framework, Cusack’s victory in winning a full ‘home’ royalty agreement for Southern Steel (1953), rather than the standard rough deal of the ‘colonial’ royalty, has a wider significance in Australian book history. Though the fact that she had to fight for this concession in London and from a British publisher exemplifies the contradictions besetting Australian writers of the time.

Yarn Spinners succeeds on multiple levels: as involving narrative of women writers’ sustaining friendships; as cultural map of the Cold War years in Australia; and as structurally innovative intervention in the writing of literary biography. North’s archival diligence and adept command of period detail are masterful, though occasionally marred by a tendency towards over­annotation (‘La Marseillaise is the French national anthem’) and a girlish predilection for the exclamation mark. The recent award of the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christina Stead Award to Yarn Spinners is entirely fitting. Not only because Stead herself hovers on the fringes of the narrative—about to visit Cusack in London, inquiring after possible jobs, having dropped by for dinner last Friday. But also because the book charts the background against which the FAW—and the institution of Oz Lit as a whole— struggled to define itself.

Details

Yarn Spinners: A Story in Letters—Dymphna Cusack, Florence James, Miles Franklin. Edited by Marilla North. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2001. ISBN: 0 7022 3192 4. pp xi + 441. A$34.95

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